Missing… Presumed Having A Good Time

Suzhou – the Venice of the East

But it sure smells a lot better than the Venice of the West. Now here’s a nice peaceful place that I could lay my head for awhile and just kick back. I checked into a not so nice hotel listed in the “Lonely Bastard”, but soon found a great HI for 1/2 the price just down the street while I was looking for an internet cafe. It’s located on the same street as the Gusu Hotel listed in the Lonely Planet. The Staff is friendly and speak decent English. Fortunately, HI rules don’t necessarily apply here and as long as you are not being an ass, you can do just about anything you want. ie they do lock the doors at midnight, but if you call, they’ll let you in or out when you need (like at 4am when you get back from the bars). There are plenty of bars near the hostel that can keep you busy at night and plenty of gardens to keep you busy during the day. Although it rained a lot while I was there, I still enjoyed chilling out for a few days especially since I met a great Brazillian and Polish couple to do it with. Hey Glauco and Ursula! They met online via Skype and decided to live together and travel together after only a few weeks of chatting on skype. Isn’t technology great! I got to practice my Spanish a bit with Marco and Glauco so studying Spanish for my South America trip wasn’t a total waste. One rainy day we just started walking and ended up in a taxi to Tiger Hill. Unfortunately, my attempt to directly translate the English name into Chinese had no effect on the driver besides a very bewildered look and a “shema???”. Apparently, the Chinese name has nothing to do with tigers or hills, but more a big Pagoda . Here were some beautiful serene bamboo gardens and some of the most telling signage into the rudeness and the state of the social contract in China. It’s really sad that signs like these need to be posted. For example here’s a totally clueless bitch that decided that she would take as many pictures of her and her friends, walking directly in front of my camera when I was clearly waiting to take 1 picture of my father in front of the Terracotta Warriors Pit. Her and her friends took no less than 4 pictures switching people before I lost it and blinded her with this photo and asked her to step aside for a moment.

On my last night in Suzhou, we went out and got a nice massage. The girls there spoke Mandarin and understood a little Cantonese and most likely a little English. So it was great, I could communicate with the massage girls and ask them to work on specific places on my body (once again, you all have dirty minds) like my shoulders, lower back and inner thighs LOL. And they could ask me to translate for them to ask the boys to shed various articles in their way. The girls were all speaking Mandarin and laughing every few minutes so I decided to ask the boys in Spanish if they wanted me to ask the girls for “un termino alegre“. We all laughed and melted into our hour long massage sin Happy Ending. You’re welcome, Glauco, I’ll never tell. LOL
Although I wanted to stay longer, I had to move on to meet up with Pete from Shijiazhuan, actually he’s from London, in Shanghai. Of course, I waited ’til the last minute to leave for the train station and was late as the walk to the bus station and the bus took forever. I got to the ticket office about 2 minutes before my train was to depart so that wasn’t going to work. So I asked for a ticket on the next available train to Shanghai. The guy gave me a ticket and didn’t say a word. As I walked out of the ticket office, I realized that the next available train was leaving in 10 minutes. So I hauled ass back towards the departure hall and almost missed the “next available” train. Of course this train had nothing to do with civiliazation like the last one. It was a special double decker train where I had to climb up and down stairs for 8 cars to get to my designated seat because the train would have left me if I didn’t just jump on the first car I got to.

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 26th, 2006 at 12:40 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.